Creator Confessions: My Relationship With the Internet and Making Content

After more than a year of making content, I've been reflecting on the online ecosystem and my place in it. I'm taking a break from my usual podcast structure to talk about what I've learned, what has been good and bad about the experience, and what I'm looking to next. This episode is more about transparency than learning, but you will walk away knowing more about how I view my content from behind the scenes. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The information and ideas expressed in the allegedly golden podcast are legal explanation and legal analysis, not legal advice. While I am a lawyer, I am not your lawyer. If you need legal advice, please contact a licensed legal professional in your area. My opinions are my own. For better or for worse. Frank is here with me, licking the piece of furniture that I'm sitting on, because of course. And this episode is going to be a little bit different. For one thing, this is an audio-only episode. I am not recording video. And the reason for that is this is a little bit more of a personal episode, and I want to be able to speak candidly and freely and unscripted without worrying about how I look on camera. It's always a balance when I'm making videos that I'm posting online. You know, I don't want to look like absolute dog crap, but I also don't want it to ruin good content. Um, but today I want to talk about some things that have been circulating around my brain, and I don't want to have to worry if I look pretty if I do it. So this is an audio only episode. It's also special because I am not going to talk about any cases today. No civil disorder. I'm not going to do legal ease. Um, although I'm probably going to sneak a couple of things in there because I can't help myself. Um, but today, you know, we've had a lot of that. There's a lot of cases going on, there's a lot of action going on, and I appreciate so much everyone's attention to it and investment in it. But I try to make the content that I'm feeling at the time. And what I'm feeling right now, what I've been feeling for about the past two or three weeks, is my relationship with this content and with the internet as a whole and where I sit in it and what I want to do with it next. And I would not be where I am in this journey without the wonderful people who follow me and tell me what they like and don't like and what works and what they want to hear and what they want to see. And so I thought it was only fair if I was going to think about these things that I be transparent about it and share them with you. It is a little self-indulgent, I admit. But hopefully it will at least not be self-indulgent and boring. So I kind of I've kind of started thinking about this chronologically, right? Because as a Gen X person, um, the internet is a second half of life experience for me. The first half of my life, there was no internet. I didn't start using the internet until my mid-20s in law school. And I didn't start really posting public comment until my late 40s, almost 50. And so the internet really is a second half of life environment for me. And I've been reflecting a lot lately on like, where do I post and what do various platforms do? And what are the things that I see over and over again? And can I do anything about those? Where do I fit in this larger ecosystem? And I'm also at the same time as the parent of a teenager thinking about what's good for my kid. How much should he be on the internet? What is he learning about what's on the internet? Is it a good thing or a bad thing, right? All of those things are happening at once. And so I think that, you know, it's always in my brain every day as I'm looking towards the future and I'm thinking about what do I want this to be? Do I want it to stay the way that it is? Do I want it to become something else? And if so, what do I want it to become? So I'm gonna share that with you. Like I said, my first online experience was in law school, and it was very functional. When I started law school, it was I got at my very first email address. Um, and I started learning how to do online research. Although we still had to learn how to do research in the books at that time. Lawyers and paralegals will know what I mean. And I started learning what the internet could do. And of course, like anybody, no matter what age you are, it is a Pandora's box in all of the ways, both good and bad, right? So I started learning what this tool could do. But I've always been a pretty private person. I know that's shocking to hear, but I I typically have not, traditionally have not put my personal information out there for people. And so I was very wary of actually posting on the internet. Part of that is because I was working for law firms and I had pretty high-profile clients, and I was like, okay, I don't want to do anything that would screw up their case or my reputation. In part, frankly, it was just a fear of strangers. Like, I don't want strangers to come on and say things about me or comment about me or whatever. I didn't like the idea of strangers being able to see me because that seemed negative to me at the time. And I think that's because the generation I grew up in, the time that the internet started being part of my life was also the exact point in my life where I was becoming the most educated I would ever be. So I was questioning everything, which is what you're supposed to do in higher education. But I questioned the internet too. And because of that, I did not post or make commentary, even comments on other people's posts for years. Years. I would like things sometimes, you know. Um, I would make comments on my friends' posts, like on Instagram, like, hey, happy birthday, Shelly, right? But in terms of creators that I didn't follow or websites that that people put their personal information on, I never shared my own. And I never shared what I thought about theirs. And people would say to me, What are you planning to run for office or something? And no, I wasn't, and I'm not. But it just felt like an overshare to me, again, I think because of my age and my generation. And then at the same time, I was litigating and I was learning about, you know, how easy it is to get hold of people's communications and seeing how people could be undone about things they'd done on the internet. Yes, even 20 years ago, lawyers were starting to figure that out, and I saw what that can do to people, you know? Um, and so that just had me dig in even more. Um, I did have Twitter back in the day when it was Twitter, but I never tweeted. I may have retweeted like a video about a family member or something. Um, but I used it for news and I didn't comment on there either. Um, because I just again, I didn't, it felt scary to me. My instinct was not to do it. Um, and then I eventually got a private Instagram account that I use basically for family to say, like, here's pictures of everybody's baby, here's pictures of everybody's dog. Um, so I never really made content even as a commenter for a very, very long time. For decades, actually. Now that doesn't mean I wasn't on there. Um, I was a major viewer and a lurker, right? Um, immediately upon discovering the internet, I was like, this is amazing because you can see other people's lives. It is immediately fascinating to me to be able to see the experiences of people who are not you doing things you've never done in a place you'll never go. I love that about the internet. And I love that about social media. That's one of my favorite things about it. Now, yeah, there's a little bit of Schadenfreude in there, probably, right? You get to see things that you otherwise would not have access to see, and not all of those things are good. But there's also real camaraderie in that. You know? I mean, I was just out of law school. I've told this story before, when 9-11 happened. And the camaraderie that you could get by going on the internet and just watching everybody talk about it together was so different than the other major world events that I had been through when I was younger, like the Challenger blowing up or the savings and loan scandals. I ran Contra and all those kinds of things. So I immediately was like, okay, I like this. I like the camaraderie. I like being able to see what other people are doing, what other people are thinking. I like being able to have a conversation or to tap into a conversation, even if I don't speak, without having to actually talk to anybody, without actually having to ever meet a person in real life. That's of tremendous value. It was then and it is now, right? Um, and I think starting at the time that I really started lurking around on social media, that's when my level of empathy really started to expand. Because if you allow yourself to see it all or to see things that are different, you cannot help but be empathetic because you realize there are so many other experiences that people are having. There's just not enough time in life to meet all the people who've seen and done and been through all of the things. There's not enough time to watch enough documentaries for that. But you can see that stuff on the internet, and I think that's tremendous value. And I certainly credit the internet with helping me expand my level of empathy for human beings in general. I did not grow up in an environment where empathy mattered very much, especially not for strangers. And that is something I've had to work very hard at. And I think I wouldn't have been able to do it without the internet. And that's one of the things that I talk to my kid about, which is, you know, it can be a great tool because you can see that not everybody lives like you and not everybody has what you have, but you also have to be careful because it can be dangerous. I have to give a shout-out to the internet on the humor part. The humor and entertainment on the internet is unparalleled. As they say, the internet is undefeated. And it is. There are more clever and witty and creative people making online content that I would ever have the ability to meet in real life, right? It's amazing. I love it. I can't, and people, especially the people who do the weird shit, I fucking love it. Because my regular day-to-day life does not put me into contact with, you know, people making random skits in their community theater basement in Iowa. But that shit is hysterical. I love it. So the humor and the entertainment piece of the internet is huge for me. I just love that we are able to share videos and memes and all that. And of course, it has a negative side. But in general, you know, you try to surround yourself with people in your real life that are funny and witty and all that, but they can only do so much, right? We can all only provide so much to each other at a couple of meals every couple of months. But I know that I can always go to the internet and social media if I want to find humor, and I do every single day. It is my favorite thing about social media to this day, is how funny it can be. Um, and you know, I like to see all the different ways of telling a story, and I like to see all the different ways people are using music and people are interpreting books and people are making art, and I don't have time to read all of the books and go to all of the art shows and see all of the things. But being able to see a lot of that stuff on the internet feels uh fills a need, a need I have. The other thing, and this is kind of where it starts to cross over with me, is you know, I realized that the internet gives us all this opportunity to learn from specialists, people that are at the top of their game and their field, whether that is something academic or not, you have access to these incredibly knowledgeable and experienced people. And that is such a gift. Now it is also fraught, right? And it was fraught from the start, I remember. Because there's distrust and there's fraud, and there are people who are going to exploit it because there's somebody who exploits every good thing. That's just one of the rules of the universe. If you create something where everybody gets to participate, somebody will take advantage of it. And so people do take advantage of that. And we're obviously as a society still grappling with that issue of how do you determine if someone is actually knowledgeable about what they're talking about when you're on the internet. Um, but I have found so many people who just have their like niche thing that they know about, whether it's like a weather guy, one of my favorite follows on social media is a weather guy because he does all the maps and the models. I love that shit, right? A weather guy, a pet person, a person who knows something specific about a specific type of animal. Art people, people who are experts in certain mediums of art. Like, I love that stuff. It's amazing. I had this um like aha moment, and I just think of this whenever people say, Do you think the internet is valuable? This was on Instagram actually, years ago. And Jenna Lyons, who, if you don't know, was the president of J.Crew for a while, and she kind of rebranded J.Crew, and um, she's sort of a fashion icon, and she's amazing. And she was on her Instagram account and she was talking about different fabrics and how they're made, and she made this fabric about velvet, and she's I still remember it. She said, I don't think a lot of people understand that velvet is not a fabric in and of itself. Velvet is a weave that other fabrics can be woven into. And my mind exploded. I was like, what? Now I would never seek that information out. I would never go down to my local bookstore and be like, let me get a book about how velvet is made. But that expanded my mind in so many ways because of her expertise that she shared for free on social media, right? So I do think it can be incredibly useful, used correctly. Now we have access to a lot of information and we have to be careful with it, of course. Um, I think it can be useful even if it's like, hey, you're not the expert, but can you tell me who the expert in this field is? Who's the person?

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Right?

SPEAKER_00 16:47

We used to say who's the guy, but now I like to say who's the gal. Who's the gal who does this? I have seen more people on social media find medical specialists that they need because they crowdsource the information. Oh, there's a dude in Tucson, and he only does L4 back surgeries or whatever. Um, and I personally have benefited from that. I personally have benefited from other people's expertise, not just gentle lines, but other things too. And I feel like maybe that's why I like doing it myself as a creator. I like being in that community. I like being part of something that I have enjoyed for a very long time. But a big, big part of the internet for me and my personal experience has been in the fashion and uh beauty space because that is something that I love, um, although sometimes I fight with it. And I I don't know that I can overstate how revolutionary it was to me when I realized that there were women on the internet who would try on clothes for you and show you how they look so that you don't have to go to the store and do it. The idea that there are thousands of fit models, and you just find the ones that look the most like your body, and they will try on 27 pairs of jeans, and you can see how they look, and then they will tell you where to buy them. As someone who grew up, like, do I want to go to Express to buy the jeans or do I want to buy guest jeans? Right? There weren't that many options to begin with, and there was no way to know if it fit you except to go to the store and try it on in a god-awful dressing room that smelled weird with terrible lighting. And hope to God that you didn't hate yourself. That was the only way to find clothes that fit. So I'm sorry, but it it is life-changing, it has been life-changing for me. Influencing and fashion influencers in particular. Now, they're not all good folks, and I have my issues, I'll talk about it in a second. But I've like tried to explain this to older women in my life, like what this they're like, I don't understand. And I'm like, you you go on the internet and you find people who have the same body type as you, or they're the same height and weight, or whatever, and then they will try the clothes on and you can see how it looks on them, and then you know whether you should buy it. And I don't think they even really understand what I'm saying. But that has changed my clothing acquisition so much, I can't even remember the old way anymore. Now, when I go into a brick and mortar store and you know, I'll pick something up in my house and be like, Are you gonna try that on? I'm like, what are you nuts? No, trying something on in the store. It's 2026. Please. Um, of course, this is also packaged together with, you know, dealing with my body issues, body issues that I think everyone in my generation has. Um, you know, you only encounter, again, so many people in your day-to-day life that are like, oh, that person has the same body type as me. But on the internet, there's tons of them. You can see people who have either your body type or things about your body that you don't like that they seem fine with. Watching other people learn to care about and appreciate their own bodies has, of course, helped me care about and appreciate my own. I still have a lot of work to do. I am not perfect in this regard. And one day I'll do a whole episode about this. I've talked about it a little bit before. But what I have deconstructed, I could not have done it by myself. I needed to watch women I'll never meet, most of whose name I don't even know, do it online for me to realize that I can do it. Piece by piece, video by video, photo by photo. Not to mention that, you know, as a working parent, there are incredible conveniences that come with the internet, like LTK, other people's LTK. Oh, I can just click it and buy it. Great. I do it, I literally do it while I'm in meetings. Everyone laughs at me at work and at every job I've had for the last 20 years. If I'm looking at my phone because I'm bored in a meeting because somebody is flapping their trap, somebody will text me and be like, what are we buying? Because I can. And that's great. Now, in that regard, I definitely still have triggers. Um, mostly there there is a type of woman that triggers me that does not know that she is triggering me. And it's not her fault. But every time I see her, she's like an archetype to me, right? Every time I see her come across my screen. Uh, I get triggered. My brain kind of does this little flippy thing. And that type of woman is tall, rail thin, and you can tell that they were born that way, you know? And all their limbs are the perfect shape, and they usually have blonde hair, although not always, but they have silky blonde hair and they have a really chiseled face. The genetic lottery people, right? The people who it's just like, oh, they were just born that way. And I'm not mad at them because they were born that way. I'm old enough now to not be like jealous of what other women look like. I look how I look, and you look how you look, and everybody's fine on the same planet. It's not that. But when women who look like that try to give me fashion advice or styling advice, where it's like, oh, you could wear it like this, or oh, I like to wear it with these shoes, or oh, I like to do this with my sweater. My brain does not hear that. What my brain is screaming is silently, what was it like to never have to wonder what stuff would look like on you? Because I just cannot comprehend it. What was it like to never have to wonder? I wonder if they'll have a size in that store that fits me. What was it like to never have to think about, you know, is am I going to be able to find something that's appropriate for this event that also looks okay on my body? Never. If you are 5'11, 120 pounds, I'm not saying that those women don't have body issues. All women have body issues. But they have never had to do the circus act of it's not just a matter of finding what's cute and what your style is. First, it has to exist and then it has to fit you. And so when I see women like that, my brain just goes into some sort of weird mode where I'm like, I am looking at a person who has never in their life had the thought, what if I try to look good, but everybody laughs at me because I'm trying to look pretty and I'm not? And if you've never had that thought, I cannot relate to you. So I still struggle with that. I struggle with those kinds of creators, and I struggle with that in fashion content. I try not to follow a lot of those people, even though some of them have really good fashion advice and some of them have really good stuff. But I have to take it with a grain of salt. There are days where I'm like, I can't watch her today because it's too much. And I will get in my feels about it. Um, in terms of like drama on the internet, I don't like it in real life. I don't like it on reality TV. I don't like it on the internet. I've never really gotten sucked into like real housewives or like when uh there's an internet beef. I mean, I guess I kind of got into Alex Cooper and Alex Earl, but I've I've never gotten into like the celebrities fighting or any of that. It just doesn't interest me because I don't I don't like it in any other realm. So luckily for me, that's not been a part of the internet I've ever gotten sucked into. Um, the other part of the internet that I really don't care for, some of y'all are gonna hate this, is wedding content and baby content. And it's not because I hate weddings, and it's not because I hate babies, and it's not because I'm at a point in my life where I'm past those things. I didn't like them back then either. I didn't like baby content when I had a baby, and I didn't like wedding content when I was planning a wedding. Because that content most of the time just does not speak to me. It speaks to a type of um interest and focus and desired outcome of those events that I just do not share and I do not really do. And so there have been several influencers and follows over the years where I loved their content and they're like, I'm pregnant, and then they post like three baby videos in a row, and I'm like, I gotta unfollow. I can't, I can't do this. It's just not what I want to see on my day-to-day feed. If I know you personally, if there's a chance that I might hold that baby one day, I'll watch your baby video. Otherwise, I'm not interested in it. And frankly, that is a lot of fashion and beauty content is wedding stuff. A lot of it. And so I take that with a real grain of salt. But those things set aside, I think generally the internet has been good for me. I think social media has been good for me. I think I've gotten a lot from it. I think it's helped me as a human being figure out a lot of things about myself, figure out a lot of things about the world and other people. Like I said, I think it's really expanded my empathy for others, which has to be a good thing, right? Um but that all goes into how I make content as a creator. All of it. And then made content to follow up, and then really became a creator in earnest as twenty twenty five went on. I was thinking about all of these things. I was thinking about what I experienced as a lurker and a washer for a very long time. What do I like to see? What do I not like to see? And a lot of what I do and a lot of what I create is built on that. Um, but I have a couple of rules for myself, and I literally put them in an iCloud note and an Apple note, and I keep them on my phone, and sometimes I add to them about my guidelines for myself in doing this. Because there are no guidelines. There are no guardrails out there to say do this, but don't do this. You have to make them for yourself. And so once I started getting into doing this a lot, I made some rules for myself. And some of them I still follow to this day, and I'm I'm adding on to that list as I go. But my number one rule that I made back then and that I continue to keep is that I cannot need internet reactions for personal validation. If I get to a point where I need it, I'm making content because I need validation, I need people to tell me I'm smart or great or funny or whatever, then I have got to stop. Because I think that that is when the internet starts to suck the life out of you. I think that's when you can lose the plot, right? When you start making content because you want people to praise you, that is like a it's like a praise kink of types. And I gotta tell you, it can be incredibly addictive. That is one of the things that I have learned. It can be incredibly addictive to open up your phone after a long day of work and see a hundred or two hundred people tell you, you're brilliant, you're pretty, you're awesome, you're a role model. It can be very addictive. And I set that rule for myself because I had experienced some of that already. And I just feel like that is one of those things that I've always got to keep in front of mind. I should probably just have a sign made and put it on my desk. I can't emotionally need it. I can emotionally enjoy it, but I can't need it. Because when I need it, then it owns me. And I don't want that to happen. Another one of my sort of basic rules is I do not want to preach, I want to show. And that is in part because of what I as a consumer have decided I like. Right? I make content that I would want to watch. I tell you guys that all the time. And I don't like it when people preach at me. I like to decide things for myself. I like things to be presented to me as like, let me show you how this works, and then you can decide what you think about it. I think that's the most effective, and I also just think that's the most professional way to act, if you are a professional. So I don't ever preach. I just want to show. And I literally, when I am making a video and I'm not really sure how I want it to read or what I want the tone of it to be, the question I ask myself is what would I want to see? How would this speak to me? And I think that that is also something that as a creator, you really have to keep your eye on. Are you just preaching at people? Because again, the validation is super addicting. You can be like, it's like this, and I'm this, blah, blah, blah. And people go, oh my God, you're so smart. Where have you been all my life? You're the best, you're amazing. And that shit, that shit is very, very satisfying. But I don't think that that's necessarily the job. And I'm like that in my day job too. I'm like that as a lawyer off the internet as well. Now, sometimes the job requires that you sit people down and go, now you listen to me. Here's what you're gonna do, and here's what you're not gonna do. But I don't really approach client advice any differently than that. I say, look, here's the good and here's the bad, and here's a different way of looking at it. And could have you thought about looking at it like this? I think that if you see somebody um taking a path that you're not sure is the right one, stepping in front of them and saying you're on the wrong path, first of all, they might not do it anyway. They might not step off the path anyway. Um, but even if they do, they're not gonna learn anything in the process. They're not gonna learn why. But if you walk them through, like, let me show you another perspective on this, and it may change your mind, then they've learned something. And so I try to do that in my content to the greatest extent I can. Now, the problem with that, of course, is that it's the internet and you have to get people's attention. And so I'm always trying to balance attention versus exploitation, right? I don't want to become clickbait. I don't want to, you know, put in a headline or something on the front of a video text that's like, you know, something crazy. But sometimes it's worth being like, you'll never fucking believe this, right? But that is a constant balance that I'm trying to strike as well, which goes right along with staying in my lane. As many of you know, that is one of my other big rules. And, you know, people are constantly asking me to cover criminal cases. And there might be some somewhere down the road that I do. But I don't want people in my lane, which means I know they don't want me in theirs. Now, there are lawyer creators who jump all over lanes, and that's their business. But I'm real skeptical. I want to make sure there is something to add, right? I'm actually adding to the conversation. Another rule that I have added over the last six months or so, and I did this after I had a couple of run-ins with a couple of other creators. Some of you will know who those people are. Uh, one of whom called my office and my local news trying to get me fired. Um, and one of whom just lost her mind because I said something about her. This was like, this is more than six months ago. This was sometime in 2025. Um and what I added to my list was don't make myself the issue. Don't let me become the issue. I can have an online persona. I can have people trust me and trust things that come from me and be an authentic human being, but I shouldn't make myself the story. I'm not the I'm not the story. I'm here to do something for folks. But if I make it about me, you know, what people are saying about me or whatever, that's a problem. I'm gonna talk a little bit about, you know, feedback in a minute. But that's another one of my rules. And, you know, I want to be genuine, I want to be authentic. My the best compliment that anyone can give me is I feel you're really authentic and I feel like I really know you. And, you know, you can believe me or not, but you do. When I'm making this content or I'm doing what I'm doing now, usually my husband or my son are in the room and they're like, oh yeah, you're just saying the same shit. You're just saying it into a microphone. This is what I'm like, for the most part. And I think that that's important and I want to be genuine. But at the same time, not all strangers are good strangers, and you have to have personal limits. And I've had to set what my limits are. My number one limit is my kid. No one fucks with my kid. That's part of the reason I don't tell people my full name, even though some people know it. And it's part of the reason why I don't say where I live, even though some people know it, because that would make it too easy to find him. That is my number one priority, is him. And that's partially because, yeah, like Mama Bear, you know, you want to protect your kids, but that is also because his life is not for me to even talk about on the internet. You may have noticed that I very rarely talk about him. There are all kinds of things I could talk about, parenting a teenage boy. And I would have content all day, every day. But that's not my his life, it's not my story to tell. It's his story to tell. And I don't think it's fair to him to put his life out there for people to hear without his consent or knowledge. And and frankly, even if he consented, he's too young to know what he's consenting to. So I don't do it. He is my biggest line. My biggest line in the sand is my son, which is, I feel like the right priority. Um, my other big line is personal attacks. Like, you're stupid, you don't know what you're doing, what kind of lawyer are you, you're dumb, no client would hire you, that kind of stuff. I will accept all the criticism in the world. Criticism, yes. Attack, no. They're different. You know, if you're gonna do this, if you're gonna be on the internet giving your hot takes, you have to be able to handle the reactions. I learned very early on, you got to have a pretty thick skin. And frankly, you know, I was so worried about for all those years about getting feedback from strangers. And 99% of it is good. 99% of the feedback is good. Um, and I don't mind constructive criticism at all. I like it in my regular life. I like it when people say, you know, I don't really like the way you did that. I'm like, okay, thanks. My ego can handle it. I can handle people saying, I don't think you said the right thing, or I don't agree with your position on that, or I don't think you read that the right way. Okay, cool, fine. Um, but attacking me as a human, who I am, what I stand for, what I believe, that is that is too much. Um and so I will block those people. I will not get into fights with those people. Sometimes I'll do a clap back video just because I'm in a fucking mood. But, and I'll screw it up, by the way. Like there's a 100% chance that I will screw this up because everything has screw-ups, right? That I will engage when I shouldn't, or I will clap back when I shouldn't, or I will respond to a comment instead of just deleting it. And I've learned that. I've learned that the hard way, um, with especially a couple of people who were followers from the very beginning who were supposed to be my friends. People that I talked to about my personal life and their personal lives and some very deep and personal things, not in front of everyone, who decided to turn their backs on me so that they could, you know, support Blake Lively even while the evidence was against her. And these are, you know, if you think it's hard to take online criticism from strangers, try taking it from people you thought were your friends in front of everyone. That is not fun. Um, so that's just a part of the job that I've learned to accept. Um, sometimes it's harder than others, but most of the time it's fine. Um, most of the time it doesn't bother me, especially especially when it doesn't go off the internet and into my real life. That was a fucking crazy experience. I hope that never happens again. But I can handle the criticism. But I'm not going to sit and let people make personal attacks on me on my own page, because why would I? It's my page. If it's not constructive, I don't have to deal with it, right? And I think having 25 years of a career where I get yelled at every day probably helps. But then you got to deal with what doesn't happen on my page. You got to deal with what happens on other people's pages or what happens on other websites or what happens on SNARK pages or whatever. And that is a real challenge, I have to say. What do you read? What do you watch? What do you react to? What do you care about? What do you let yourself even know? You know? Um, I've told a couple of people who've asked me about being online and if I have any tips. And one of the things I found myself saying to all of them is the hardest part is not figuring out what content to make. The hardest part is knowing when not to say something. Not because it's the high road, not because you're a saint and it's like, I'm gonna take the high road and I'm not gonna say anything, because it doesn't serve anybody and it doesn't serve you most of the time. That is hard. I, you know, I don't read most of the other websites. I don't read threads or Reddit or any of that stuff because that can't help me. Um that can only piss me off. I didn't believe for a while people who said, like, oh, I never read the bad press about me, but now I kind of believe them. Because if you do, it'll just fuck you up in the head. And it will change the way that you make your content. And I don't want my content to be changed because of what other people think. I don't change my life because of what other people think, so why would I change that? Um in my work life, I'm really, you know, I'm in a zero-sum game a lot of the time. One side wins and one side loses, right? Someone gets fired and somebody doesn't. But in my life life, I'm not competitive that way. I don't compete with anybody. I don't compete with other creators, I don't compete with people who troll me on purpose. And you know, I truly believe in life at this point in life, at least. If I'm competing, I've already lost. I'm not competing with anybody for anything. I want everyone to have their space and their shot and their area. I mean, the number of times that I could have gotten into the comments or stitched and made response videos to every single thing that certain people on the lively side said. I mean, I could have made hundreds of videos of nothing but that. But I didn't. Because they can say what they want to say, and I'll say what I want to say, and then people can decide. But one thing that I I feel really strongly about again, and maybe this makes me an idealist, I don't know. My crazy Content has to rise and fall on its own merit. Right? I can't rely on being against somebody or something, even. Like, I can't be like, oh, I'm I'm pro Baldone, even though I don't consider myself that. I'm anti-lively or whatever. I don't consider myself either of those things. But like that's not that that is not what I want my content to be branded as. It has to rise and fall under the fact that it's good and that people want to watch it and that it's helpful. And I feel like as the creator, that's my job. My job is to make the content that is of a high enough quality that people want to watch it on its own. And I think I've been pretty good at that so far. And I want to keep doing that. Um, one of the things I really struggle with as my following has gotten bigger is reading all the comments. I feel like reading your comments is part of the job. You have to know what people are saying in there. Not just because they deserve to be seen, but also because you need to know what people are saying. Right? Um, and you know, I get this text message or you know, message or whatever, direct message from TikTok. I get it every single day. Where TikTok tells me that for creators with a following around my same number, I get more engagement than 80% of them. More people leaving comments, more people liking, all that. And I think that a reason for that is because I engage in the comments. And I think that's a big part of the job. But it gets hard when there's a lot of them. If I make multiple videos in a day and they're on TikTok and they're on YouTube, and I've got hundreds and hundreds, and sometimes over a thousand comments in a day, it can be hard to read them all. And I sometimes save them for the weekend, and it's like, you know, I'll go back and read them. But one thing that I have done, one thing I have finally allowed myself to do, is to not absorb or respond to the comments that are not meant to be constructive. Right? I'm not gonna argue with people about dumb shit in the comments when I've got a thousand comments in a day. The other day, this earlier this week, this is one of the reasons that I decided to do this for the podcast this week, was the judge ruling against tag on its motion for summary judgment, and then all of the judge's corrupt comments came back around again on YouTube. And I just lost my shit. Because that is not helpful. If you want me to explain to you why this happened or what it means, I will. But I've just I've gotten to the point now where I can finally just say, not gonna read, not gonna read, not gonna read. If there's personal criticism, I'll just block them. You can block people on every platform in some way, shape, or form. But what I've also learned, and it took me a while to learn this, is to let my followers do some of that work. If somebody says something crazy, or somebody says something or inaccurate, or somebody says something nasty about me, I don't have to jump on it because I have built a following of people who will do it for me. And I have to let people do that. That is, I think, one of the things I have learned as I've become somebody with a larger following is that you have to let some of your community do those things for you. I can't, I can't respond to every nasty comment. And I thank anyone who's ever done that. I would never send people out to defend me. I would never send people out to other people's pages to defend me for sure. That is not a requirement of being a follower of mine. I loathe the idea of, you know, you're with me, so you do my bidding more than about anything on earth. But on my own page, when it's like people are talking shit about me on my own page and I can't get in there and respond, when people are like, hey, actually, here's what she said, or hey, she made a video about that yesterday, or whatever, I really do appreciate it. And I've had to let go of some of that control, and I think I'm doing much better with that. One of the questions that I get most from people who say they want to do creation, but they're scared. Or they want to make videos, but they're scared. One of the things I hear the most often is I'm scared that people are gonna talk about my appearance. And boy, do I get that. I you can believe it or not, but that was my number one fear in making content. I know that I'm smart. I know that I can make sense of things, right? I speak publicly all the time. But I was terrified to put myself out there on the internet to be criticized. Because of the mom that I have. I have an almond mom who was incredibly critical of my appearance, is to this day, incredibly critical about my appearance. My biggest fear was to get on the internet and have people be like, you're ugly, you're fat. I was terrified. I am still very conscious of how I look, like I said before. I want to be real. I want, I don't want everyone to be like, you know, I've got 17 pounds of makeup on every time you see me, but I'm also vain. I'm a woman, right? Um, but honestly, that has not really happened. I can think offhand of maybe two comments where someone commented on my appearance. And I think a lot of that is because my following is pretty curated to be fine people who wouldn't do that. And I think if somebody did it now, I would probably laugh it off. Because, you know, you see what those people end up looking like. But, you know, I think that it's fair to anticipate it, but it's also not a given. It's also not um, it's also not automatically gonna happen. I do think some of it is the type of content that's being made. I think that if you're making fashion and beauty content, then people will comment on your beauty and your body because that's what you're showing them. So I do think that that can be harder. I think when you have something else in your content, whether you're talking about, you know, interior design or being a mom or whatever it is, I think that makes it less front and center and that makes it less likely that people are going to do that. But, you know, as a as a commenter, as a watcher, I never comment on somebody's appearance or their home or whatever unless I'm saying I love it, right? Like, oh my god, you look so hot. Oh my god, I love that. I just never do that. I just don't understand anybody who would. I don't understand anybody who would take time out of their day to tell somebody that something looks bad. Like I just, that's beyond me. I fully acknowledge that there may be entire conversations happening about me in that regard on Reddit, which is why I don't go there. I saw some pretty nasty shit early on that people were saying about me. And it got to me in a way that I did not like. It really upset me. And I learned I just can't go there. Now, I had to go there back then because people were trying to dox me over there. Um, and so I had to go in there and try to put a stop to that. But in terms of like what people say about me on a snark page on Reddit, that is that is none of my business. Because obviously it isn't affecting my success because my accounts have kept growing. So let those people have their shitty little time. Those are people talking behind my back, and um, you know, I don't need to know what people are saying about me behind my back. That's none of my business. I fully acknowledge that there may be conversations about me and my appearance or my life or my home or whatever happening on Reddit, which is why I don't go there. I had to go there early on a couple of times because people were trying to dox me over there. And so I had to get in there and figure some stuff out. But the little bit of snark that I saw over there about myself was so disturbing, I just cannot go back there. I refuse to let myself go over there. It can only hurt, it cannot help. It's this horrible feeling of like, have you ever walked into a room and thought everybody was talking about you? It's like that, except you can hear the entire thing from beginning to end, and you can hear it over and over and over again. It sucks. And I don't like it. And it's not gonna help me, it's not gonna make me any better. If if the people who follow me have a concern, they will tell me, they will message me. People have done it before. Hey, stay away from this or hey, be careful about this. So I just can't go there. And the fact that I don't go there, I know it might sound weird to people, is growth for me. Because it is incredibly tempting. I mean, think about it right now. What if you knew that you could go on to Reddit and find entire conversations about you, your house, your job, your husband, all that stuff. You'd want to see it, right? It's really hard. But I think I have grown enough to know that that is not my friend. Reddit is not my friend. What happens there is not my friend. Lawyers' content, legal content as a sub-genre, is crazy on its own. Like it's its own world, and it is the wild fucking West. Everybody is finding their way. You know, there are people who have been doing this for a while, like the Emily Bakers. Um, and she's kind of got her part of it figured out. But, you know, everyone's just kind of doing their own thing and everybody's doing it differently. And I don't think there's any real, again, there's no real guidelines. You have to set them for yourself. Um, you know, the the way that the media reports on litigation, whether it's civil or criminal, this horse race coverage about who's winning and who's losing. Obviously, you can choose to have that drive your coverage or you can not. And if you choose to have that drive your coverage, you know, that can get you a lot of eyeballs. Um, and it makes it easy to make content because you know exactly what to report on. And sometimes I do that. But that can't be all of it for me. I don't want that to be all of it for me because I'm making content because I don't like that coverage, because I think that coverage is getting it wrong, right? Um, you know, I think it's a pretty established rule for lawyer creators that we don't try to like predict what a judge or a jury is going to do. We may say, you know, I think they've got a 50-50 shot, or, you know, I think the jury is going to find with this. You know, we'll sort of guess, like, I don't know, this is probably what I would do. But, you know, as a lawyer creator, I don't think any of us are in the prediction business because we know that that's a fool's errand, right? I mean, if you're if you're a litigator and someone comes into your office, whether they're the plaintiff or the defendant, one of the first things you say to them is, I cannot promise you a specific result. Because that would be, I mean, it's unethical to do that. So, you know, you know that things are gonna happen that you expect, and you know that things are gonna happen that you don't expect. And that can be really hard for followers to handle. It can be really hard for followers to handle when their team, a team they consider themselves to be on, uh, loses. And that's why a lot of people jump to it's the problem with the judge, it's the problem with the system. And I I get that. I'm I'm actually quite sympathetic to that. Um and of course the system can be unfair. Of course. It is a system built by and managed and operated by human beings. It can be incredibly unfair. It has all kinds of flaws. You know, I'm of the belief that it's the best, it's the worst. No. Let me try that again. I'm of the belief, I follow the principle that the American legal system is the worst system in the world, except for all the other ones. Of course, it has inherent flaws. Of course, there is corruption, of course there's dark money and problems. Um, but that doesn't mean that it's baked into every single thing that happens in a case. So I'm very empathetic to the idea that the system can be unfair. But as somebody whose job it is to work within the system, that unfairness is kind of baked in. You know, I think as a lawyer, you learn really quickly that you can make the best argument, the best way, and still lose. That's the game, is that you're gonna have to fight for every single call. And that can be a challenge to explain to people how unpredictable it is and how unfair that can seem. And I understand that. But I was thinking about something this morning, and I wonder if this will help. I don't know, but I'm going to say it in the hopes that it does. And that is that appeals courts exist for a reason. You know, every single trial court, which is where cases start, have appeals courts above them. The federal district court has circuit courts of appeal and then the U.S. Supreme Court. State courts have intermediate state courts of appeal and then state supreme courts. And they have those appeals courts because the judgments that are made by the judges in those cases are hard calls a lot of the time. The right to have a decision reviewed by an appeals court is not a mechanism for deciding if a judge is corrupt. If you think a judge is corrupt or has a conflict of interest, you don't appeal. You go to a judicial board. That is a different thing altogether. But hundreds and hundreds of appeals courts exist across the country because the job of a trial court judge is often very difficult, and they are very often making very close calls. Sometimes they're not, sometimes they're easy. But if if calls are easy, they don't make it to court. They're usually in court because the calls are hard. And there's a famous quote, I can't remember which Supreme Court justice it was, talking about how someone watched a Supreme Court argument and said, it seems like all you guys do in there is split hairs. And this justice said, Yeah, that's exactly what we do. We split hairs. Because a lot of times that's what the law is. And appeals courts exist to look at those decisions to say, you know, was this a 5149 or a 4951? That's what a lot of appeals are. It's that close. And so I think that's why I'm so resistant when people say, you know, oh, it's the judge, or especially in the lively case, oh, the judge is so corrupt. And I'm like, or he's just wrong. Which judges are all the time for all kinds of reasons. You know, the reason that job is so hard, and the reason that it pays so well is because you have to make really hard judgments. It's why they call them judges. They make judgments. If it were easy, you wouldn't need someone that qualified to do it. I wouldn't want that job. I think that job is too hard. I have no interest in that. That is too many close calls for me. And I frankly don't think it moves the ball in terms of education or understanding to jump straight to bad intent right out of the gate, right? I can I can question the system and the people in it, but still respect the system at the same time. And I don't think that's that hard. But I do recognize that the reason that we all get so invested in this stuff is because the stakes are high, right? That's why it's so interesting. That's why I love this stuff. That's why I like doing it for a living, at least most of the time, because I love drama. And high stakes drama is good and it doesn't get any better than cases like this, than trials, than legal disputes. But again, I have to use my expertise and my experience in it to add value to the conversation, just like I would do in real life. I believe strongly that you don't speak up and say something in a meeting or a conversation unless you have something to add. I don't speak just to say I've spoken. Now, also I'm old enough that I don't have to do that anymore. But I will add to a conversation if I think I have something of value to say. But if I don't, I just don't. So, where am I going from here? I don't know. A lot of it is sort of a process of elimination, actually. Um, I'm not trying to market for business, right? I don't want to like put out a shingle of my own law firm and get business by being an online content creator. Some lawyer creators do that. I'm not interested in that. I also am not interested in doing cable hits. Um, you know, there are decent legal analysts out there, but a lot of what legal analysts have been reduced to is tell me the most obvious thing that happened in a minute or less. And I'm just not interested in that. I don't think that that's helpful, and frankly, it's probably not very lucrative. So I'm not interested in that. Um, so those are two things I know I don't want to do, but I also feel like I'm at a turning point and it feels very uncharted, right? Like I don't know which which road I want to go down. I think that the parallels between content creation and being a professor are obvious. They have similar benefits, and they allow me to do similar things. So I'm thinking a lot about that, and I'm thinking about a lot of what those opportunities could be. Um and and doing this has been incredibly rewarding. The practice of law can be really limiting. It can be great, but it can also be just banging your head against the wall all day, every day. It goes through stages, right? You go through stages where it's like, oh, I'm doing this and it's strategic, and I'm advising, and I'm helping, and I feel like a hero, and this is great, and I'm working with great people. And then there are days where you're like, if I have to read one more retaliation claim where somebody says they were retaliated against because they were late to work 30 days in a row, I'm going to lose my shit. And so the content creation has given me something rewarding that I could never get in the practice of law because it's just too zero sum game, like I said before. And the older I get and the more experienced I get, the more I want to help people. I want to take my knowledge and my experience, be like, let me help you get through that. And it's interesting, as a practicing lawyer, some people want that and some people don't. Some people are like, I just want you to get me from A to Z. But I'm not interested in that anymore. Not nearly as much as I used to be. And of course, meeting people virtually or otherwise, listening to people, hearing the perspectives of people is so fascinating to me. I have I have learned so much by reading other people's comments. I mean, when my husband will say, let's, what's the biggest surprise to you of content creation? I always say, how many smart people there are out there? People get stuff. And granted, I am incredibly fortunate. I feel like I've curated a wonderful group. But on the daily, I read a comment and I'm like, that is such a fucking good thought. Wow. And that brings me a level of like peace and comfort that one doesn't often get in 2026. So I know I want to keep doing it. And I know that my um You know, what I wake up being excited about is not like, let's schedule this person's deposition so I can ask them questions, but more how should we think about this issue? How can we make this make sense? And so what I'm doing is trying to work on what that looks like for me, what the right mix of things looks like for me, which of those things make me income and which don't, and how all of that will work. And, you know, if you have feedback about that, please give it to me. I've gotten great feedback so far, whether it's comments on this podcast or a DM on um, you know, one of the platforms where you can send DMs. I'm happy to hear your feedback. You guys have great ideas. But I want you to know that I am very much thinking about where do I go from here? And yes, I do think part of it is the lively case is going to be over soon, one way or the other. And how do I want this to work going forward? And I wanted to just lay bare for all of you guys what's going into my thought process, how I think about it, and how I'm trying to build from there. And I really appreciate you listening to it. And I will end just by saying, since I get this question a lot, should I make content? Do I have tips? You know, I've I've got a couple of friends now who are like, I've got someone that I'm gonna send to you because they want to start doing online content. I'm like, well, I'm gonna start charging people because this advice has value. Um, but there's some sort of basic advice that I've landed on and I'm gonna give it to all of you. And that is if you want to make content, whatever it is, do have those rules for yourself going in. Go back and look at what you have consumed, what you like about it, what you don't like about it, what things you think I'm not ever gonna go there. And bake those rules, put those rules on yourself before you start. Hold yourself accountable with those rules. You may add them, you may delete them. But know what you're doing and know where your limits are before you start. The other thing is something I wish I had learned earlier, which is to block people who are assholes. I am just constitutionally like wary of blocking people. I think because I'm such a First Amendment fanatic and I believe so much in free speech, even if it's awful, that it took me a while to block people who were just on my page being dicks just for the sake of being dicks. Don't make the mistakes that I made. If people are being dicks, block them the first time. Because, you know, and that's different, by the way, than blocking anybody who disagrees with you. That I don't think is helpful. But if someone says something nasty, why do you have to put up with that? They're just gonna do it again. I've learned that the hard way, trust me. And then as you're doing it, if you make content and you do it for a little while, you do it for a couple of weeks or a couple of months, I think the question you have to start asking yourself is does the good outweigh the bad? Am I getting more from this than is being taken away from me? And that doesn't have to be monetary, it doesn't have to be praise. It can just feel good to do it. Sometimes it just feels good to do it. Are you is the good outweighing the bad? And if it is, then you keep going. So thank you all for listening to this self-indulgent rant. Frank is staring at me as if to say, Bitch, where's my dinner? So I'm gonna go take care of that. But don't worry, I'll still be here because the drama never stops and someone has to make it make sense.